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Annual Fee For Your Comment?
CaptainThunderbolt writes "Imagine this: you read an interesting story on Slashdot and you have a comment to make, so you login only to be greeted with a message saying you will need to pay a fee in order to make your comment. Seems ridiculous, doesn't it? Why on earth would you pay just to make a comment? Well, that is exactly how thousands of Aussies feel right now. AtomicMPC is an Australian PC Magazine with a fiercely loyal readership and an equally loyal online community. Yesterday it was announced that access to the most popular sections of the forum will soon attract a $20/year fee unless you are a magazine subscriber or a high-ranking forum member. The reaction to this announcement triggered the most vicious backlash I have ever witnessed as the website feedback forum went beserk. Users baulked at the idea of having to pay to access a community which the feel they are responsible for creating and I must say I understand how they feel. Is this a trend I should worry about? Will I one day have to pay a membership fee to access other popular forums?"
Now might a good time to disable the "Subscriber Bonus" by default...that way, they won't know who you are.
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After all, Capitalism is the best, right?
Well, after you run off every worthwile user who donates their time making content, well...
I wonder how much it would cost if Slashdot paid hundreds of worthwhile scientific people to make +4 and +5 comments?
This is an entirely original occurence, a trend like this would be Something Awful.
*cough*
I, for one (and hopefully not the only), would be more than willing to pay a fee for something I find useful... Just because it started out free isn't a guarantee it stays free.
And, juxtaposed with other things in my life.... $13/mo for tivo subscription (and don't flame me about mythtv.... time invested is worth money, too), $600 insurance/year to drive my car, $30/mo for ISP access, $30/mo for satellite TV.... I only marvel so many things have been so free for so long. So, in context with other things I pay for, I'd happily pay $20/yr for something like the right to do this on slashdot. Not saying it should happen, but sometimes things just gotta be paid for!
I may not WANT to pay for yet another "thingy", but it's a system of choice, and if the sum total of things I want and their costs exceeds my budget, I selectively cull thingies until equilibrium is re-established. It's the way the market works.
And, for the record, I sometimes fear the OSS/(and linux) community hurts their cause by their sometimes overly militant won't pay for anything mantra. I once asked a commercial vendor of a really good product if they'd consider vending a linux version.... they responded they were too small of a shop and really couldn't afford to create a version for a community that didn't want to pay for their product. Not speaking for the "community" I did tell that company I thought there may be more of a paying public out there in the linux world (but I really don't know). ~
I think that people don't like paying for something they used to get for free, but there's precedent for it. The OP needs to stop pretending that there isn't.
ShortFormBlog: Writing a little. Saying a lot.
Only if it gets rid of all the trolls and FPers...
Even if it was like $0.50 US the simple requirement of doing something might prevent people from doing it. Maybe. Probably not.
For large sets, this will be our guide even unto death, for the LORD will work for each type of data it is applied to...
Not if it's for Slashdot.
-]Phreak Out[-
The SomethingAwful forums charge $10 to join, $10 for access to premium features, and other various small fees for things like custom smilies, titles (for yourself and others), etc. It is ruled with an iron fist, and the banhammer falls with startling regularity.
It's also one of the best, most vibrant communities on the internet. Cash is an effective gatekeeper.
(I think the secret to SA's success is that the fees are one-time, as opposed to subscription-based. It creates a sense of ownership and value. I bought an account, not just a subscription)
Even Jesus hates listening to Creed.
Well, I seem to recall a recent discussion about advertising and the blocking of same and whether or not there is a social contract between the producers and consumers of free content. Argue it any way you want, but the fact remains that if advertising quits bringing in the money, the only other alternative is to charge for services. Hardware and bandwidth and time ain't free. Call it a social contract or call it market forces - the end result is the same.
We use forums in our little ISP business as an invaluable form of customer feedback and communication. In fact, to such a degree that we spend NO money whatsoever on any other type of advertising or marketing. To impose a fee for people to post feedback, comments and suggestions is to me like asking for money from people to watch advertising on tv. Just crazy.
Operating the forums is not free, why should the magazine continue to sponsor the forums for non-subscribers?
People are certainly welcome to start and host their own forums if they don't feel like paying. Then when the bill for the bandwidth comes in, they will be welcome to start charging as well.
Atomic magazine has been going down hill in my eyes for a while now, this is just going to dig its grave even more.
Don't like it? Don't pay.
Doesn't it make you feel good to know that our freedoms are protected by politicans, lawyers and journalists.
Imagine this: you read an interesting story on Slashdot and you have a comment to make, so you login only to be greeted with a message saying you will need to pay a fee in order to make your comment. Seems ridiculous, doesn't it?
I seem to remember Slashdot wanting to remove features that used to be free when it planned to introduce its subscription service... it took a fair amount of whining from Slashdotters to change the editors' minds about that one...
Commercial online communities have a long history of this. People didn't really resent on Compuserve, The Source, Prodigy, GEnie and AOL that they paid to participate in the communities they were building. They just asked if they got value to match their money. Of course there were also lots of free BBSs at the time and paying BBSs, and there were arpanet mailing lists even earlier, and USENET groups which were "free" but you had to be part of a select club to get at them at the start.
Of course, if offered something good for free, people like it and will switch to it. But paying communities thrive today in both MMORPGS and things like Second Life (which does let you own the stuff you build in order to attract people who do have this concern.)
But this is nothing new, it's a competitive battle that will continue for a long time to come, with free and paid and people choosing.
Has it been over a year since you last donated to the Electronic Frontier Foundation
If you wanna read this post you gotta pay a small fee, oh wait you already are reading it! And ofcourse if you wanna reply, well that is another small fee. PayPal please.
Please start charging to post as soon as you can. Then just maybe people will actually read other people's posts before posting the exact same thing over and over.
"There is no real right or wrong, just what the majority accepts at the time."
As someone who operates a large site with fiercly loyal members, I can vouch that even fiercly loyal and frequent members are not always (or even often) willing to contribute financially for that service.
There is nothing wrong with looking to make a profit (or at least break even) on your work and the services you offer. If people really care, they can pay for the service. If they don't, they won't and you'll have to reverse your policy and find another way to survive (or just stop providing the service). The control is in the hands of the members. If they find it isn't worth paying for, they won't participate and the policy will be obliterated. If there are enough that make it profitable, it will remain.
It's called capitalism. Supply and demand. Not everything has to be free. Christ, I wish I could get paid for the thousands of hours I've put into my service. That'd be wonderful. There's nothing wrong with trying.
That said, I just don't see how this is a big deal?
I would prefer to see an IQ test to make a comment.
(and don't flame me about mythtv.... time invested is worth money, too)
Only if one can find employment. Right now, the only job that hasn't turned me away with "Sorry, we went with another candidate" is a job with the VA hospital that pays $0.00 an hour.
This is *bad*. If everyone starts doing this, Google will get it into its head that it can make gmail non-free, and we'll all be stuffed! (at least, all of us who have gmail accounts, which seems to be about 1/2 of the geek community) Let's hope they open it up again and every one can see that crime doesn't pay! :)
The reason charging fees works in some communities and not others is the way it's presented. There's nothing wrong with charging admission per se, as long as it's done by following the community's zeitgeist. To take a real world example, the site owners could have made a big fuss about monocles over six months, and then charged visitors for monocle polish.
...it keeps the riff-raff out.
My other first post is car post.
This seems to work well for webmasterworld.com (a popular webmaster forum/news site) which has certain topics which can only be responded to by paying members. Many people consider their website conversations valuable to partake in, and I'm sure it also provides WW with alot of money. So maybe this will work with this site too.
On one hand I understand the need for membership fees to certain commercial sites. Places like IGN and Gamespot rely on subscriptions to keep their services running. And to a lesser extent, Something Awful requiring a one time fee to be apart of the community. It can be argued that since the forums are for a magazine, the magazine subscription is your access to "premium" content.
But on the other hand, it's also a quick and dirty way to make a cheap buck. I doubt that forums are draining the resources of the magazine or diminishing it's prestige. I certainly wouldn't pay for it.
Oh well, either the people will accept it or reject it. This move will either generate more income for them and clean up the clientel, or it will be an act of biting the hand that feeds you and alienating your core fans.
I'm betting on the latter.
I mean, SomethingAwful charges to post last time I checked, and with ad rates not as high as they once were, it should not be too shocking that a forum would need some sort of payment.
Now, $20 for that particular forum seems a bit steep, but I suppose if you really like it, it is less than $2 a month, hardly a major outrage imo.
Boo yeah!
(and it didn't cost me anything....)
The Straight Dope Message Board has gone to a subscriber-only setup. I no longer post there. This is a particularly interesting move given that Cyril still states in the Ask a Question submittal form that one should start by posting to the MB. I'm definitely not commenting on the columns anymore even if there are errors. (Which I sometimes wonder was why they implemented subscriptions...)
This sig has absolutely no significance and serves only to take up screen space and waste the time of the reader.
If your existance is so trivial that this matters, then you may wish to spend some quality time getting a life.
and damned if you don't.
These forums gobble up a lot of bandwidth and that means money is needed to fund them.
Without subscribers they'll cease to exist, but if they force the issue, they are alienating the people who made their forums great, and that's logical - in the new order of things, the contributors don't get paid for making the site great, but they have to pay to contribute.
A lot of businesses nowadays forget that capitalism goes both ways.
My solution would be to either use the Slashdot "contribute if you want to" format, or pay dividends to the top members. Ack, scratch that last one. How would I know who's the top contributors?! Because some trolls gave 'em the highest rep?! Hmmmm... I think the Slashdot idea is the best solution.
--- Grow a pair, liberals... stop letting the Republicans bully you!
They should use a Slashdot-like-moderation-system, the rules would be as follows:
* If someone gets modded +5 Insightful or Interesting within a day, it's on us, because we're nice like that.
* If you get modded overrated you owe us a buck.
* If you get modded redundant, that's two dollars
Now here's the catch, so pay attention:
The first time you get modded troll you pay five dollars, the second time you pay five dollars AND you start with a -1 rating from then on, the THIRD time you pay five dollars, and CowboyNeal (or whoever the Australian equivalent is) comes over to your place and beats you with a baseball bat for 5 minutes.
As for getting modded +5 funny, well you don't really want to know what happens when you get modded +5 (it's bad, but not as bad as what the grammar nazis will do to you), so please moderate this post accordingly.
Dear Slashdot User,
Thank you for your continued support of our website. Unfortunately, Slashdot ad revenue has not been sufficient to cover our operating costs in recent months. To solve this problem we will be instituting a new moderation and meta-moderation system. Effictive the first of next month, only Slashdot subscribers will be eligible for moderation and meta-moderation. In addition to this, moderation points will be awarded on a per-dollar basis.
A 'Basic' $5 subscription will only provide 5 mod points, and only when the subscriber comes up in the moderator rotation. The 'Complete' and 'Deluxe' subscriptions (available for $25 and $100 respectively) will provide a daily allotment of mod points: 5 points per day with the 'Complete' subscription and 15 points per day with the 'Deluxe' subscription.
We believe that this new subscription model will be sufficient to keep Slashdot operating for the indefinite future.
Thank you,
The Management
"The newly born animals are then whisked off for a quick run through a giant baking oven." --heard on Food Network
Sounds like a job for micropayments. I wouldn't neccesarilly want to pay a yearly subscription fee. But for the odd occasion I feel like I have something to say, I'd put in my 5s n't-seem-to-like-here> to have other people listen.
Especially if such a system weeded out mass spammers and trolls.
"You know, Hobbes, some days even my lucky rocketship underpants don't help" -- Calvin
You mean you guys aren't sending Cmdr Taco a dollar every time you post?
**insert favorite profound quotation here**
Fuck them!...
Okay, okay... I take it back, UnFuck them.
Insanity: doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results.
"Due to excessive bad posting from this IP..." error messages. Taco says that if you pay the $5/1k pages, he'll fix that problem. Charging a subscription price is one thing, but being dishonest about it is wrong.
that's the most insightful comment of the month even though we're only two days in.
Right now, one of the "big ideas" in the scientific journal biz is "pay to publish" - since restricting electronic distribution is an obviously stupid thing, the industry is scrambling to think of something.
A lot of people there seem to think it makes sense for the author of the paper being published to pay for the publication costs himself - the argument is that the fees can just be folded into the researcher's grant proposal and so won't have much of a negative effect.
I personally think that idea is very stupid, and I hope that as the Aussies have rebeled so does the scientific community. The people who benefit from the work should be the ones to pay for it in some fashion or another.
For example the aussies ought to look at a peer-reviewed system where comment posters get discounted to free access while lurkers have to pay "full" price (note the peer-review to insure bogus posts don't flood the system just for free access, peer-reviewing would also qualify for discountage).
For the journals, I think the "lurkers" ought to pay too - the university libraries and corporations that currently pay for subscriptions should continue to pay, in advance. As long as enough groups pay in advance to fund the journal's operations, the results would be free to all. If not enough groups are willing to buy subscriptions, then the journal should either close down and give all the money back, or operate on a smaller budget with a smaller number of articles published.
When information is power, privacy is freedom.
Now I can pay to get first post (yeah, I know, I didn't make it.. but maybe I would have if you had to pay $20 bucks to do it)! I'd gladly pay you Tuesday for a first post today! *grin*
Interesting though.. is the Internet really "free" or is it really all valuable property that translates to something physical in the real world? Do communities on the Internet somehow "own" the virtual land, or do they have to pay for it? Somewhere out there these are real bits on a real hard drive that cost someone money to supply!
It also brings to mind questions like why do people pay for virtual objects from massively multiplayer online games? Or.. why do we still pay to watch commercials on cable TV (or ahem... obtain our media from other sources)? Where is the value!? Where is the worth!?
One thing is clear - there is a new economy at work here. Maybe it is Peter Drucker's "knowledge" economy, or maybe folks are starting to realize that with money can come actual quality. To be fair, let's not forget that with money (and I suppose even without it) comes control, power struggle, and who knows what else..
It will be interesting to see all this play out!
-6d
Professors and other science researchers often face this same issue. Researchers submit research articles to journals and then often pay fees (e.g. publication costs) and sign over copyrights to the journals. It's a strange world. (Of course, researchers benefit by becoming well known, getting academic jobs, winning Noble prizes :-) and getting grants. Still, many journals would not exist without freely submitted research (and publication fees).)
What the article submitter forgot to mention is that If you buy the magazine you get access free for 1 month.
So you have 5 groups
1) Subscribers - They have paid money and get access for the length of their subscription
2) Mag Buyers - They get access every month they buy the mag. All they have to do is enter that months code. They have paid money for the mag and get a free months access with it. This is reusable for every month.
3) You are a God or Mod or SuperHero or Hero - You are at the top anyway so you get access free
4) You dont buy the mag - so there is a $20 year charge for something that is based around a magazine and is a commercial entity. Heck slashdots subsribtion cost money. You need to stay afloat
5) You dont buy the mag and dont want to pay so you just lurk
I don't know how many people come to slashdot for reading the comments, but I am one of them... Many readers like reading the comments and not just the main article. In such a case, readers help the magazines popularity! Do they really need to pay for writing comments too?
Hmmm... almost every service I've subscribed to offered ad-free browsing (presumably because the $10 they get from you beats the 50 cents they'd get from banner ads all year long, particular with all the blocking options). That said, anyone wonder if the amount of people blocking ads has contributed to this trend. I know I've been blocking pop-ups for years.
This sig has absolutely no significance and serves only to take up screen space and waste the time of the reader.
I'd pay money just to know that there wasn't a website in the world with a black background and white text.
Maybe it's just because I'm dyslexic, but the only thing harder to read is black background with dark grey text.
got through about 3 pages of posts before I got a headach, and didn't see any "vicious backlash".
Airliners.net does this also. I'm an aviation enthusiast and I like to contribute to sites like it and to railphotos.net (I'm also a train enthusiast) and people get ads to look at my pictures. Yet airliners.net wants to charge me to post to their forums (I got as far as "reserving" a username before it refused to let me get the account without paying).
If they use my material, which I grant them permission to use (and they credit me, they don't transfer copyright to themselves) and they get ad revenue from putting ads on the pages showing my photos, why should I have to pay? I've already essentially paid by helping them get more ad views/clicks.
I let the "reservation" time out because I didn't agree with their policy.
i am a soviet space shuttle
It's their site and their forum, and they can do whatever they want with it. If people don't want to pay they will just move and form another community.
The forums at The Straight Dope moved to a subscription system last year. They claim that it was necessary given the costs involved with maintaining a forum and bandwidth. According to Cecil, they're actually losing money on the forums, even with subscriptions, but the subseciptions to help to minimize the loss.
Plus, what's $20 a year, compared to the $15 a month you pay for online games like WOW or COH?
One word: TotalFark
Four letters: UFIA
Okay, so a philosopher, a philologist, and a philatelist walk into a bar...
The restrictions affect two of their about twenty forums - those two being a "general chat" forum and a "buy/sell" forum. All the others, general PC chat, hardware, linux, programming etc. will still be free for all. And being a computer magazine, these are what the forums are about - anything else is a bonus.
It's the same as Aussie broadband site, Whirlpool, only allows access to its "off-topic" forums (TV, sports, news, music, etc) to long standing members. The site is about broadband, and anyone can access those forums, but off-topic forums are a priviledge.
- Chuq
I hardly see how paying for news in irrational, unless you LIKE having a corrupt society where the papers and government are run by those with the most money. If people think it is ridiculous to pay less than five dollars a month for news, then truly there is no hope left for society. Remember, just because you don't have to pay for it doesn't mean it's free.
and fist the grandparent.
MacFixit.com went for a subscription model. Content from the past day can be accessed for free but anything else is archived and you have to pay to see.
Even if some aspect of that has changed in the past several years and the site's policies are different it doesn't change the fact that some or most of the content was user submitted.
The reason I mention this is because what else are forums but user-submitted content?
It doesn't matter if the website can't figure out ways of making money off of the forums or whether a search engine makes money when a forum page shows up in a search. The thing is charging for users to submit content that will or could be used by the site's operator is not quite right. The site should seriously take advantage of the traffic and get ad dollars instead of charging to play.
Think about it, what if you had to pay a fee to get a newspaper to print your letter to the editor? And, then the newspaper still charged to get reprints of that letter and the op-ed pages?
Forums are user-generated content. If someone wants to charge people to submit it then expect some fury.
That said, I'm a paid member of at least one forum but that's about helping to cover costs for a small site with no other revenues. A print pub has an advertising dept. Let the ad people figure out how to get sponsers to support the forums.
* Shrug *
Hindsight's 20/20, of course, but it seems obvious to me that you introduce fees in a formerly free setting by charging for new, premium services. To use Slashdot metaphors:
Raise your children as if you were teaching them to raise your grandchildren, because you are.
This was done without any forewarning to the 'fiercly loyal community' - I realize that they are giving the best part of a month for decisions to be made before the locks are shut - but its pretty much an overnight change which has made these forums an ugly, un-navigable mess for which commitment is demanded.
Something awful is being mentioned here quite alot, but what they don't mention is they also have a private torrent server set up for subscribers. They try to hide it as best they can because they don't want the place flooding with people who want to use it. But it is there and thats what most people pay for (just don't tell no one COUGH)
I like muppets.
It would stop lame people like ME from making lame comments oowee oowee never ever never ever ever *squaaaa*
And how is this general idea different from a newsgroup? I of course never abuse newsgroups via the alt.binary.xxx sections... They are for commenting and discussing....
In undeveloped countries, the consumer controls the market. In capitalist America, the market controls you.
I guess that is Australian for balked...
That sure looks like Boot magazine that I used to subscribe to - at least they had the decency to implode instead of going through a lingering money-sucking death. I'll never complain about a magazine I like going out of business again.
I do feel it's pretty stupid to make people who are the life or your forums pay. The more people you drive away, the more people will be driven away. It's like the reverse network effect.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
You don't pay, but actually spend your time in meaningful, troll free discussion areas, like Tech Talk, etc., which will remain free to access.
I don't know about the Atomic boards specifically, but in general, charging money for forum access keeps out the riff raff (read: trolls, spammers, etc.), and this is a good thing.
Slashdot's discussions do okay because of the moderation system, despite its flaws. But ever read an unmoderated discussion on say...Ain't It Cool News? Read their Talk Backs for 10 seconds and you'll wish you still had a CRT monitor so that you could punch through it and end your painful existence.
By charging for access, you keep out the riff raff.
The ViewAskew.com boards (View Askew is Kevin Smith's production company), among others, has been doing something similar for a while now. To register on the View Askew boards you need to pay 2 bucks. It's a low fee, and it all goes to a rape/incest survivor charity, because, after all, Smith isn't trying to make a profit from this registration...the money is really just a gate keeping mechanism. $2 is low enough to not be prohibitive for legitimate users, but high enough to keep out the idiots.
You forget that most of the code to Slashdot is free software. If that ever happened on Slashdot, it will take about ten minutes for a new site called Slashpoint or something to pop up.
In the free software community, garbage like this will simply not be tolerated. Behold what happened to XFree86 when they thought they were too smart.
Thats right we all get to choose. If you don't want to pay for a crappy website then don't pay for it. There are almost unlimited forums to discuss computer games, hardware, networking, etc. We discuss that stuff right here. So rather then bicker and babble about a site that has crazy admins, you could just turn to a site. I can tell you right now that there are thousands if not millions of sites that would love to have the traffic that don't charge.
I would pay $20 a month NOT to read most of the comments on Slashdot. But I guess that's another story completely...
As long as you buy US$50.00 a year in merchandise from Thinkgeek, that is.
Guaranteed! This comment 100% Anthrax free!
At first, I read this and thought to myself, "these people have got to be insane, charging people to post comments." Then it occured to me that if Slashdot were to implement this, you would see a remarkable improvement in the quality of comments posted to the site.
Here's how it goes. Right now, anyone with an IP address can post a comment to Slashdot. Therefore you get a lot of trolls, people with agendas, poorly thought out comments, first posts, and so on. The moderation system tries to deal with this stuff but to no avail. There has to be a better way.
However, an annual fee will not do the trick. There needs to be a per-comment fee, say 25 cents. That way, the only comments you would see would be the ones the submi[tt]er cared enough about to pay 25 cents to get it posted. And when you think about it, 25 cents isn't much -- perhaps enough gas to drive 2 miles.
I mean really, do you want to waste your time reading a comment that the original author cared about so little it wasn't even worth 25 cents to them to put it up? This simple fee would ensure that only quality comments get posted to Slashdot. No more First Posts. No more GNAA. No more mindless Microsoft shills. In general, no more worthless comments. Only comments worth at least 25 cents. If you're posting from work, your boss probably paid you more to write the comment than what you paid to post it to the site. It's not asking a whole lot.
Hear recorded Slashdot headlines on your phone! New service beta testing. Just call (248) 434-5508
I'm going to go out on a limb and guess that as the cost of internet access and computers go down, and free software becomes more and more available, we'll see more free and more for pay communities.
The pay ones will probably be nice, slightly bland places tucked away like gated suburbs, and the free ones will continue to have tons of gems and excitement mixed with even more trolls and redundant nonesense.
I get SO much pre-info from those pages that it is SO worth it for me. I wonder if perhaps the nominal fee keeps the trolls at bay (sorta, we get a few "Gamecube is TEH GHEI!!! XBOX RULES!!11!!" losers), and there are few people w/multiple ids ($40/year is pushing it). But I guess if it used to be free and now isn't, i can understand their frustration...
I personally would never pay to make a comment on a board. If you don't like what the magazine is doing it's time to move on.
There is an advantage to restricting posting on certain boards, because you can cut out idiots and trolls if you do this carefully. There is no advantage to restricting commenting based on who has more money. It's called trying to make a quick buck. People forget that commercial magazines are about making money and not about giving people a warm fuzzy feeling.
In the end this will likely damage the quality of the magazine, because sensible people without a large disposable income are not going to waste money making comments somewhere for a price, when you could make them elsewhere for free and enjoy other areas of the hobby.
Still they're free to run their business how they like. Vote with your feet. It's the Aussie way!
These posts express my own personal views, not those of my employer
I send you this fee in order to give my advice.
YHBT. YHL. HAND.
That said, of course slashdot would fold if it went subscription only. That would be stupid bordering on the insane (cut your traffic 10X, expect the rest to pay for reduced value, you go from here.)
Slashdot makes money. Not as much as they might like, but... well, I have the same issue. They're here. I'm here. That is not some proof that God Loves Slashdot, but it is a nice reminder that services that serve are, well, useful enough to pay their own way.
I forget what 8 was for.
It should be noted that:
* Those who buy the magazine - do not have to pay (they get a code on the magazine)
* If they subscribe - they have their subscribe id (and free use).
* Else they pay $20 - which is those who just go there for the site.
Also, do note that only -certain- forums- need to be paid to view/post.
All technology related forums are free for all.
# /usr/bin/perl -w
use English;
s/(ba)u(lked)/$1$2/;
Shop as usual. And avoid panic buying.
There were even comments by admins that if people left because it cost to post, it would decrease the server load and that would be okay.
I let my membership expire this week, and haven't really cared.
Am I the only one who got this one? If anything it should be moded "+1, Sarcasm".
Lousy mods as always.
Not Buzzword 2.0 compliant. Please speak english.
You pay me and I won't troll your sorry asses. It's win-freaking-win, baby.
Let me be the first to lay down my dime and say "up your ass."
no, i dont have a slashdot login...
/., whether it be for good or bad reasons (hey, i thought they were amusing!)...
no, i dont particularly want to be identified by those members of the forum being discussed that actually know me (though i'm sure a few will guess... meh)
i happen to be one of the "high-ranking" forum members mentioned, and though i get a free ride, i'm rather annoyed at the fact that a lot of my 'lower ranked' friends will now be charged to keep in touch with their mates, as there are a number of members of the community who either dont buy the mag, or live elsewhere in the world where the mag isnt sold...
at the same time i can see where Haymarket are coming from...
i did have something useful and constructive to post here, but all i'm really feeling is ambivalence, and cant make up my mind whether to support this idea fully, or be outraged...
oh, and i just thought you'd like to know that there's a small group of atomicans that are quite chuffed that the community made the front page of
Bwahaha... lol the quote that /. is currently displaying to me at the bottom of this page is:
<i>The best things in life go on sale sooner or later.</i>
Oh shit... now I'm suddenly worried about what I can expect in the future of this plac<b>[Bill Received: $20 per character after the first 240 current total: $20 for #1 character]</b>
Gravity Sucks
people shouldn't have to pay to leave a comment or have an opinion. If I lived in australia I would start a free external forum so people could post on it about the other site.
move the party elsewhere.
and idiots and trolls are just one of those things every forum is going to have to live with because idiots have money too.
I've always hated their crap ASP, poorly designed, slow and ugly forums anyway.
Good riddance!
Bwahaha... lol the quote that /. is currently displaying to me at the bottom of this page is:
The best things in life go on sale sooner or later.
Oh shit... now I'm suddenly worried about what I can expect in the future of this plac[Bill Received: $20 per character after the first 240 current total: $20 for #1 character]
Gravity Sucks
I remember briefly being a coder on a MUD. The owner was a very loud mouthed advocate of OSS and GPL, and I figured that, hey, it's just as good a project as any to take part in. And I actually wanted to give something back to the community.
In hindsight, I should have been suspicious of anyone who plays the GPL champion but doesn't actually have CVS access or released any code in years. But, still, I figured it must at least be a community among those donating the content, if not open to the world at large.
It turned out that behind the scene it wasn't even vaguely near being either OSS or a "community", or was just becoming something else. The "waah, others are copying our content" paranoia had struck big time, after someone had discovered a few of their rooms on another MUD. Think a Stalin officer purges class paranoia to find which spy is giving content away to others. You were treated like a thief until proven innocent... and there was no way to be proven innocent.
The real ridiculous part is that room descriptions and such were stuff that you didn't even have to be a coder or a builder/wizard/whatever-you-call-it to see. Any player could just bloody well turn on logging in their MUD client and have the descriptions for whole areas. But try telling that to the owners.
I suddenly needed to go through a ridiculous bureaucracy just to get the files I needed to do my work.
Worse yet, others needed to go through that bureaucracy to see _my_ code. They actually didn't even bother any more. I couldn't shake the feeling that it's like donating code to Microsoft, just for the sake of being locked by someone in a vault and called _their_ property.
I left and never looked back.
Though I suppose the damage had been done. Around that point is where "OSS" and "GPL" stopped being magic words for me. Was a bit of a rude awakening at the reality that some people will pay all the lip service in the world, but only because they like having a free ("as in beer") OS on their server. Ask for access to _their_ code, though, or in this case to code that they just took from others anyway, and it's suddenly "Noo, you can't take my preciouss."
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
which the feel they are responsible for
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Or save that, too and just use PayPal or a credit card.
Information wants to be free.
Entertainment wants to be paid.
You just want to be cheap.
Yesterday it was announced that access to the most popular sections of the forum will soon attract a $20/year fee unless you are a magazine subscriber or a high-ranking forum member.
You can also access these areas if you buy the Magazine at the newsagents, although then you do have to update the access code monthly.
Note the two parts of the forums that have been blocked are only general chat and trademart, all the tech related articles are still available free to everyone, so the comments that people have made to help the community at large are still freely available, it is only the general rubish that has been restricted. And trademart, but again that could be considered a premium service! Who complains about having to pay to use the trading post or similar??
The comment has been made that the loyal supporters of the mag are upset about this. Why? If they support it, then they are buying it and therefore will have access to all areas! Is it really such a problem for people to support what it is they use??
I'll say it again, the only part you miss out on if you don't buy the mag or pay is the general chat (The Green Room) and the Trademart. General chat is really just a forum based chat room. If thats all you use and now can't because you don't support the Atomic Magazine, what have you really lost? A chat room.
As a subscriber this doesn't impact me. I can't understand the reasoning of people who don't buy the magazine and refuse to pay a fee. If you don't support the place, why are you here to begin with?
Oh, and according to this thread the attrition rate from first year subscribers to second year was a whopping 33%.
BOO HOO. Honestly, you can't bitch and moan that you don't get to take up bandwidth for free anymore. Do you think Thomas Paine complained when no one gave him free paper to print his ideas on? Didn't think so. And his ideas are probably a lot more important than yours. I'm likely to be modded down for this, but it needs to be said.
Le français vous intéresse?
As a long time user of atomic, it's quite easy to see when things started to go pear shaped. A few months ago, the previously Australian owned magazine was bought out by a British company (Haymarket). The immediate effect was more advertising on the forums, and a drop in the mag's quality. Now, they've left 35000 users waiting for the next version of the site, only to be severly let down by this. It wouldn't be such a problem, but the site has been significantly rooted.
I think the issue more is that these people feel like they built this community into something that *can* make money, and now they're basically being told "hey thanks for all your hard work in creating something we can make money off of, now please pay to keep up that hard work."
I see both sides of the story. I get that it takes large amounts of capital to run sites like this (I used to work for userfriendly. don't hurt me), and I totally understand that they need to recoop some money somewhere. But I also see the community's side of the story, feeling betrayed that they built a community and now they have to pay to stay in it.
It'll be interesting to see how this develops... I want to study online communities when I go to graduate school, I think this may give me another angle to look at.
They GIVE ME STUFF for my comments...sounds like the Aussies are a tad confused on this concept... ;-)
I'm an Atomic MPC subscriber. I recieve the mag monthly and quite like it. As part of this change I am now a 'Green' member so I can continue to post in those sections.
The problem in this case is that people who signed up for the sign usually haven't ever read the magazine at all, making Haymarket publishing run the site at a big loss.
Furthermore, the sections talked about here (General Chat particularly and Trademart) are the only section a lot of users on the site look at, not only that, those same people never bought or subscribed to the magazine.
I fully support Haymarket in this decision so they don't have to waste money on supporting loss making websites instead of creating a good magazine.
Keep in mind there are OTHER forums on that site which will continue to be TOTALLY FREE OF CHARGE. Infact, the majority of my posts on AtomicMPC haven't been in the forums now marked for green access only.
BTW Whirlpool.net.au (an australian broadband forum) removed their general chat section completely and replaced it with a few member only lounges which only regular participants can see. They have never looked back... Although rumors of a secret club of the site creators beer drinking mates sharing a private forum on that site for $900 a year still circulate (i.e G.U.W.P.C.T)
You pay 5$ into a pool. You gain 10c for each +1 insightful mod on your posts. You lose 10c for each -1 mod on your posts. You can't gain more than 10$. Once all the money runs out, people need to pay another 5$ for the next round.
God spoke to me.
This makes me think of the old attempted "iTools Riots" of '02 or whenever it was that they switched to .mac crap. I know having a mac.com email was free advertising for users, and I know that they were loyal, but there are terms of service after all.
Of course, there's an upside to this which I see at first hand whenever Slashdot adopts its "guilt by subnet association" blocking of postings.
I find I get a lot more actual work done. I used to fume about it, but now I just regard it as the "Slashcode productivity tool". ;-)
Charge $15/comment, suddenly the trolls realise they can't be bothered, only people with serious points to make will bother posting.
Reason #1: An entrance fee - no matter how small - makes all the scammers, spammers, trolls and assholes go away.
Reason #2: $20 for a year? That's like, $1.67 a month. I spend more on junk food. And slashdot subscriptions are about as much and you get even less benefit.
"No problem. I have the capacity to do infinite work so long as you don't mind that my quality approaches zero."-Dilbert
It's a slashdot clone started by Bruce Perens. No AC posting as an anti-troll measure. Average number of comments per story looks to be roughly 0. Coincidence? Maybe.
Anyway, I hope you get my point.
This idea is brilliant.
1) Alienate your user base
2) Charge said alienated user base for the privilege of participating.
2) ???
3) Profit!
Of course with an organized (technical) and disefranchised user base it takes...how much work to put together a new website? $100 for a decent server with enough bandwidth to get you started?
Thats the thing I love about the web, the speed at which you can accompish things is astounding. Nothing is irreplacable.
Quack, quack.
Ah, I see.
You're trying to expose something that doesn't exist, using a site that has nothing to do with SA as your proof, and an argument composed of random non-facts you made up.
Good luck there.
...the one with the biggest check attached gets printed!
its called advertising. A lot of sites seem to be able to support themselves using it (erm...Slashdot?). Then if they don't want the ads (erm..) they can pay.
But its a funny story.
Quack, quack.
It has been like this at the Motley Fool for a while now.
I seriously see no need to have this 'pay-to-post' thing on the forums. Not making enough profit? Try Google's Adsense or some other more rigourous advertising scheme. Or a subscription scheme like "Gold membership" could be adopted whre you get your name put out in golden or your comments always appear above the rests', likewise a spiffy new interface with features like "watch this thread", or "mail me summaries of replies" could be used. Another way would be to make a special branch of the forum with several sub-forums to which only the paid members have access, like live tech support or something. All I wanted to make clear was that there are many ways to earn money while keeping the online channels of public communication free and open, if you look hard enough.
My last sig was ridiculed
I also disagreed with the SDMB's decision to switch to a paying subscriber system. The board still runs sluggish so I have to question the use of the money. In the board's defense, anyone can still get a free 30 days trial account (crippled : can't search) and it's trivial to keep reregistering under different names using throwaway email accounts so you're not locked out if you don't want to pay. I recently paid for membership because the SDMB is a very, very useful board unlike most of them. I won't go into details but it has proven to be a very sound investment.
The reason I read Slashdot is the diversity of ideas, like yours which I find here. I feel an obligation to reciprocate by posting and moderating and also because it's fun to discuss things.
If the system became a pay system, this would drive away many occasional posters and would reduce the value to me of reading the posts and I would no longer find it worthwhile to participate. It's not about the money, nor even about the fact that someone is profiting from my "content", but the fact that it becomes less interesting. So after a while, all the regular posters leave too because they become bored.
In the old days, I have seen many a BBS die this way (unless they had warez of course) when the sysop mistakenly thought they were there for his board and the services that he provided, when in fact, we were all there for the people who called his board.
The forums at Compassionate Coalition will always be free and open to all, we will never charge:
http://www.compassionatecoalition.org/phpBB2/
-Myke
myke@compassionatecoalition.org
http://www.compassionatecoalition.org
Wohaaa cowboy, what exactly is a high-ranking member?
Time to spam like a motherfucker on the 4th of July. WOHOOO!!!!!
, for one (and hopefully not the only), would be more than willing to pay a fee for something I find useful... Just because it started out free isn't a guarantee it stays free.
This is like Microsoft EULA. You get ham one day and *mean and meat product* the next day. And the price goes up. Woohoooo!!! I get mechanically seperatred meat by-product. Fuck steak.
And, juxtaposed with other things in my life.... $13/mo for tivo subscription (and don't flame me about mythtv.... time invested is worth money, too)
I gotta take issue with you here. I am gonna get flamed like crazy, but why pay for what you can get for free? #1) VCR. What is wrong with a VCR? Are you telling me it is so hard to record a show with a VCR? TV Guide has a show code number you can enter if telling the VCR what time to record is too hard. #2) And this is far more baffling. I know one guy, he got TiVo a while ago, and his service is FREE. I know another guy who spends $20 a month for the same thing. The guy with the free TiVo says he caught a good deal, a life time subscription for $200, something less than the other guy pays for a years worth of service. It does not seem very fair to me.
$600 insurance/year to drive my car
Who'd you hit? Geez... I buy my insurance from the guy on TV with the 1-800 number who will insure anyone. The guy with the abe lincoln hat and $99/ six month premium. Of course I know abe was not black, but at these prices I'll buy anything.
So, in context with other things I pay for, I'd happily pay $20/yr for something like the right to do this on slashdot
Not me. I'd be the first to say goodbye slashdot, you big fat bloated whore. Now make me dinner before I walk out on you.
I may not WANT to pay for yet another "thingy", but it's a system of choice, and if the sum total of things I want and their costs exceeds my budget, I selectively cull thingies until equilibrium is re-established. It's the way the market works.
Vodoo economics. I have an equilibrium too, but if you want to know about it, there is a subscription fee.
And I am the guy who is too lazy to register for the NY Times, even though it is free. If they don't have a guest/guest or asdf/asdf login, I will get my news elsewhere. I ain't paying for it. I'll get my buddies, and we'll go elsewhere. After all, we're what makes it great!
If money is what people want, why don't resturants charge a quarter for every flush? Maybe they're worried nobody will flush? People won't pay twice for the same thing. These websites make money off advertising.
Rosco: "If brains were gunpowder, Enos couldn't blow his nose."
already pay. they deliver content, and this enriches the site. extra information, more insights, peer review. let's face it: both the site and the poster profit from it.
No one can understand the truth until he drinks of coffee's frothy goodness.
--Sheikh Abd-Al-Kadir, 1587
10100111001
That's a small resume'. If you think that's a life story resume', then you apparently have never seen the resume' of a mid-level or senior developer. I've been a professional software engineer for 15 years, still only keep the last 10 on it, and it's four times that size. I suppose you'd think mine really sucks, but since I get interviews for about 9 of 10 places I send my resume', and I've been unemployed for a grand total of 10 weeks out of 15 years, your opinion would be, to be as blunt as you were, dead wrong.
Your resume has one purpose and one purpose only: Get an interview. If this guy is getting interviews, but not the jobs, it's not the resume'.
A person who can design any sort of CPU likely doesn't give a flying fuck about a Java programming gig. However, you actually manage to stumble over a truth. It does pay to customize your resume' for the position you're applying for.
Lowtax is not exactly struggling to pay bandwidth bills.
You can find numbers from 2002, when he was registered as Something Awful LLC in Washington state, with monthly revenue of around $60,000, of which only about half went to pay for server colocation and bandwidth. I'll let you do the math on what that leaves in profit.
In fact, he makes enough profit that the front page writers are also paid for their content, in addition to it being his full-time sole source of income.
10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10
Fuck! where did it go? Earlier today I was able to get past the archived comment limit (for us nonsubscribers) by using the "google slashdot" at the bottom of the page. Now it is just back to search. I felt that the default slashdot search sucked anyway and was glad they had the google slashdot search engine working. Now it is gone. What happen? someone set us up the bomb! All your comments are belong to us!
I will pay as much to make a comment on slash as I will pay for operating system software.
If I wanted to comment on a slash article I'd post on yahoo, where most slash articles seem to be recycled from nowadays.
I wonder how much it costs to run the forums.
I know Slashdot uses huge bandwidth and must have significant costs. Even Slashdot has resorted to trying to get users to subscribe for some bonus features so they can get some cash. I wonder how much they would require if they only asked users for enough to pay these basic costs. I wonder how much less this is than the cost of a subscription to the magazine. Although there can be no community without the users, there can also be none without the common medium and funding to maintain it.
Ex-SA members... guilt by association.
And you know who else was guilty by association?
That's right.
Perl, PHP, JSP... just free forums instead of ASP?
(Sorry my bad French) Je fais parler les Guignols de l'Info. Le pied, quoi.
text written by *me* published on *their* site = piece of work protected by copyright = subject to pubilcation fees, all of first issue, reprints and archival = THEY owe me money.
How is this a YRO story? Hosting a site costs money - hardware purchases and maintenance, bandwidth costs, hosting costs, etc. Sure, it's very nice if people host sites that are free for users, and it's a shame when a free site goes pay for, but YRO? Which right is being infringed exactly? My right to get stuff for free?
It's official. Most of you are morons.
No Timothy, I am not prepared to pay to post on Slashdot.
That is what you wanted to find out?
Looks like a fair number of people are prepared to pay but not me.
Perhaps this is why blogs, and trackbacks in particular, are a good idea, you can comment on other people's sites but it helps drive traffic back to your own.
Nothing comes for free. A lot of people will work really hard to maintain sites, open source projects, or whatever. What most people don't realize is that these people will also sacrifice an awful lot.
Sometimes it's money for servers or bandwidth, sometimes it's so much of their time that they end up not succeeding in their normal job. The problem is that these people never really want to ask for help but it gets to a desperate point where they have no choice but to ask.
It would be really great if there was some sort of easy to use micropayment system for something like sourceforge. I'd be happy to pay per-download if all the money went to the respective projects.
I'd also like to know which projects need money the most. If the person working on a project I use (even if it wasn't a high profile project) really needed some help I'd contribute a bit to the cause.
As a community, we really need a good funding mechanism to help out the people helping to architect our community. I don't have a good solution, and I don't think anyone will come up with one here, but it doesn't hurt to at least talk about it.
... is that you aren't forced to use any website or service solely because it's popular. There is nothing stopping you from creating an even better service. Bandwidth is insanely cheap these days and you can download forum software for free from several developers.
If you don't want to pay another services' prices, then take the iniative to compete against them. Learn as much as you can about perl, php and interface design.
Not only is it fun, the skills you'll acquire over time will become indispensable.
8==8 Bones 8==8
Sounds like someone's mad they got banned from SA
First time I'm aware I've ever posted about micropayments. You're welcome to check my comment history for a trend though.
"You know, Hobbes, some days even my lucky rocketship underpants don't help" -- Calvin
You don't pay, but you do notice that the site runs Asp and Sequel Sewer, and oh, that your keyboard has a single-quote (') key! You troll all you like, for free, and even in those areas of the website that are offline for the garden-variety, paying, customers!
Shiiiit. Are you crazy? That'll never happen!
Get your own free personal location tracker
"Anyway, I think this whole Slashdot thing has nothing to do with it.
I think this massive surge in traffic is simply a testimony to the fabulous success of the new content and access model we have recently introduced."
Of course it is!
No! It's bizarro cash for comments!
(only Australian superman fans will get the above. Please feel free to allow your eyes to glaze over.)
hmm, that sounds just just like this /. story just the other day
5 3&from=rss
Meetup.com Ends Free Meetups
http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=05/04/13/03592
Of course, it seems that not only lemmings stampede towards their own demise. Apparently suits do so to.
You do remember, dontcha?
Words to men, as air to birds.
If they want my comments they can pay me. Not the other way around.
For example, do you think John Dvorak pays PC Magazine to publish his rants? (OK, maybe that's a bad example. His stuff's so crazy, he probably has to.)
Note to slashdot editors: That'll be USD$50, payable to Anonymous Coward.
Usenet doesn't cost anything last time I checked. The sense of community in many groups is just as good as a closed forum. Sure, you get more than your fair share of trolls and off-topic posts but that's why most newsreaders were blessed with a killfile.
Spam levels on Usenet also seems to have peaked now, while the problem seems to be getting worse in subscription forums.
For all intensive porpoises your a bunch of rediculous loosers
Once upon a time, Atomic Magazine was good. I mean Really Good. I bought every copy religiously from the newsagent, and later I subscribed. It was cutting edge and always had cool grunty technical stuff in it that other PC mags seemed to take months more to discover (you would have thought that they would have had one of their staff reading Atomic so that they could at least run copycat news in the next edition).
Atomic proudly (and justifiably) boasted in one of its early issues that they were the one PC magazine on the newstands without a cover CD, as in their experience this only was a gimmick to compensate for mediocre articles, and they didn't need to play that game. Hear hear.
And then Atomic gradually fell into the trap of starting to believe its own hype. Became complacent. Instead of superior-quality articles on cutting edge technology and pulling hardware apart & hacking about in interesting ways, we started getting full-page articles of arrogant pseudo-intellectual drivel which seemed to be more concerned with narcissism than nuts & bolts. Lengthy paragraphs about the trivial personal doings of elitist writers educated beyond the capacity of their own intelligence is not what you buy a hardware mag for. And then I noticed competitor mags starting to write about new techy gear before Atomic did!
And guess what? They started sticking a cover CD on the front. Says it all really (and funnily enough, in Atomic's own words).
One of my friends, a hardcore hardware nut, stopped reading Atomic over a year ago, but I was locked in by having paid a year's subscription. The quality has noticeably subsided from those early days to a level even below their competitors. Gratuitously scatological cartoons (& occasional URLs) on the last page that are routinely UNfunny. Pointless self-absorbed personal ramblings dressed up as editorials. Ho-hum PC game reviews. O yes, they do have a few techy articles & hardware reviews still, but the chaff seems more abundant than the wheat these days, and there's better brainfood elsewhere.
One person I'd like to exclude from this flame is crazy ol' Dan Rutter, of . This guy has stuck around since the beginning, has an amusing writing style, and knows his stuff (writes the answers for their tricky problems page, as I recall).
Others on the Atomic staff however need to get back to basics & stop all this "We are Atomicans and we are L33T!!" crap, a philospohy apparently cherised by the former editor, who I think works on their website now. I got so annoyed with their monthly wank that I stopped buying their rag, and so did my mates. Charging drop-in visitors to their website & making 30-day-code users jump through login hoops? Bah. We don't care any more as there are far better things to read (like Slashdot), but it may drive away yet a few more Atomic readers...
So good luck with milking the cash cow, Atomic Dudes. But then again, maybe if you have fewer drinkers, perhaps you need to charge more for the milk.
SomethingAwful was a good example to quote here in the context of forums. Interestingly, there are other examples along the same lines but in a slightly different area, that of 3D virtual worlds, which in many ways are like forums but in more modern clothing.
For example, in Second Life (a 3D world in which you live, build, and interact with others, but not a MMOG) you contribute to discussion events in much the same way as you would contribute to a forum thread. In addition, you contribute content in the form of objects like clothes and other things that you create (objects can contain scripts, so they can be quite sophisticated), and of course you build unique mansions and places for people to visit and play in, and everything that you create is yours unless you sell it. You are adding the world content, as you do on forums.
Yet, Second Life charges you a one-off lifetime fee of $10 for membership to this world (and regular rent too if you want to own land), so in effect you're paying them for adding your own content, even if it's just your own presence to fill the world, which is quite analoguous to paying for your right to comment on forums.
In principle, it's quite reasonable to pay the host for providing the environment in which you exist. Whether it is reasonable or not in practice depends on the details of each case, especially the amount which you are being asked to pay. After all, it is the actual participants who actually give life to the world or to the forum, not the hosts, so a significant fee can never be justified.
"The question of whether machines can think is no more interesting than [] whether submarines can swim" - Dijkstra
[snap]
Comment withheld due to lack of payment - slashdot team
Yeah, free Ipod! He is innocent!
troll-less /. ._/|\_. $20 in blank cd's ...nah, i'll pass.
It takes just a moment and an action to destroy. It takes some time and thought to create.
What I don't get is why, when the moderation system and filters available allow for you to screen for almost anything, people seem to read a -1 then rant about First Posts and trolls, but hey, that's just me.
I'm a /. fanboy, I like /. warts and all. I see it as a the net's agora. Like any open gathering place you should take what you value with a grain of salt, until you've been able to substantiate it. Reading /. at +4 gives results equal to the best techno sites, but it's up to the reader to validate the information.
I liked /. best before it was sold, but think, that to date, it was at it's best about 3 years ago when the post grad ratio was at it's highest and the best and the brightest seemed to post. But again that's just me; I don't subscribe, not because I don't want to support /., but because I get alot of value out of the ads and think they're germane.
cheers
"Academicians are more likely to share each other's toothbrush than each other's nomenclature."
Cohen
'Will I one day have to pay a membership fee to access other popular forums?' you ask, and the answer is:
'No, but you may have to switch to another forum'.
For those of you that don't know, wdma.biz is the "goon"-run spin-off from the Bit Torrent Barnyard, one of the Something Awful sub-forums. Lowtax was forced to close the BTB after he grew tired of taking $10 off idiots and then instantly banning them for emailing him a question that was in the FAQ.
Most "goons" will tell you that this was yet another brilliant decision by Lowtax, because the forums were filling up with retards who registered just for the files (hence the name 'wdma' derived from the catch-phrase "Where Da Movies At", a phrase over spewed by said retards). In any other forum of this size, this might have been a problem, however thanks to the ban-happy (nigh-on paranoid) administration, this influx was in-detectable to the average forum-goer.
Pity WHEREDA.... isnt hosted and has nothing to do with SA anymore.
What, did you get banned or something? Retard.
I don't see your point. That's not Something Awful.
I'm the guy with the unpopular opinion
Well, I didn't actually subscribe. I logged in one day to find that I could see the mysterious future. I investigated, and it turns out someone gave me a gift subscription for 1000 pages (which I always view 'with ads' so the MF summaries, subscriber *, and +1 bonus never go away...)
For large sets, this will be our guide even unto death, for the LORD will work for each type of data it is applied to...
Ladies and gentlemen, a perfect example of the average slashdotter, holds together his arguments with straw and uses shitty catchphrases to enphasize his point.
motorcycle.com, which adopted software strikingly similar to Slashdot, allows you to read all comments but if you wish to make your own comment you must be a paying member. Check http://news.motorcycle.com/ to see for yourself.
Buzzing the information Superhighway at Warp speed
Except half that was bandwidth fees and the writers for the front page so more like 25-30 a month... still pretty good even though it's only in dollars...
The Users that are claiming they Created the community are unwilling to pay towards its maintainance?
... if you want me to keep it up, I need some money from somewhere ..."
They would prefer that the website/forum closed down due to lack of funds?
"Sorry Guys, I can't keep losing money on this site
"AARRGH! How dare you try to make money from your loyal custom^H^H^H^H^H^H^H readers!"
b3 4phr41d 0f my 4bov3-4v3r4g3 c0mpu73r kn0wI3dg3!
MadDwarf
http://cgi.ebay.com/ws/eBayISAPI.dll?viewItem&item =5576969872 Can you believe the crap on eBay?
This reminds me of what happened to Combatsim.com, a fan site for combat simulation games. Prior to about 1999 or so they were a free site, with lots of articles and good forums. Then they went pay-for, and almost overnight most of the site's community jumped ship to other sites. The place became a ghost town after a year or so, to the point where they first openned up the forums again, and then eventually returned the entire site to free access.
Point is, if you don't want to pay, don't. If enough people think the same, they'll fold eventually.
The solution is simple.
The "high ranking forum members", aka "community builders" should set up an own forum and move there. Creating a forum is not rocket science and they can sure find a php coder who customizes one of the available *free* implementations to their needs.
Once the alternative forum ("arche noah") is set up it's only a matter of time until word of mouth has drawn all relevant alpha geeks from the old to the new forum. The clicksheep follows and within a few months the old forum will be dead in the water.
Whoever made that decision (a pay-for-comment forum, hilarous!) is either trying to kill the forum as fast as possible or so absolutely clueless that he/she should really not be let near any internet-related endeavour (read: fire this person immediately or you will cease to exist before 2006)
Fair dinkum? These drongos have got Buckley's chance of gettin' away with this! Their tech support will be busier than a one-armed Sydney cab driver with the crabs fighting of these cheesed off ockers. They've have really got the rough end of the pineapple on this one, mate! Streuth! The idea of charging for this service is as brilliant as an ashtray on a motorbike!
Wouldn't a user then expect some modicum of respect for a comment, regardless of how insipid? ... after all, they paid good money to make that comment.
... :-/), sites which allow only for-fee commenting may have to relax some of their moderating practices.
In the same way that Slashdot is in no way obliged to pay attention when I complain about their constant erosion (I don't consider spelling "lose" as "loose" and "balking" as "baulking" as advancing the language
I think that once money changes hands that formal terms of service...with concomitant legalities, will follow.
If someone implements a subscription system on their forum they had better be ready for professional and mature management.
They risk losing customers otherwise and possibly even risk legal headaches from people who are not content to simply cancel their subscription and move on.
There will be less room for the inconsistent and sophomoric forum management often seen on the web.
When people pay, they expect more.
The original poster mentioned that the forum members in the article were angry because they felt that they contributed to building the community for which they are now being told to pay for.
Healthy on line communities often happen by accident.
It takes a different set of skills to throw a successful party then it does to set up an internet forum.
There is no shortage of empty web boards, abandoned email lists, unused Usenet groups and forgotten IRC channels.
A person looking to implement a subscription based forum should be sure of his/her social skills and ability to intentionally create ( or at least maintain ) a successful social environment.
S/he may have to start one (over) from scratch if people chose to leave ( or not come ),
If a forum owner has these skills then s/he has something to offer in exchange for charging a fee where other forums owners with the same I.T. skills do not.
Any technically skilled person can set up a web board, an email list or an IRC channel. However very few people who can do these things also know how to create a successful social environment.
If someone wants to charge a fee for a forum s/he should be aware that if s/he only has I.T. skills then she will have a huge number of competitors...and a huge number of free competitors to deal with.
I can't believe that people who are financially minded actually pay for the favour of giving other people stock tips, but they do. Something's gone wrong. I would pay for content that a site develops, but as soon as I have to pay for my own opinion, I'm out of there.
It's a weird fact that everyone will bitch and moan but they'll still pay, IMO.
Here in the UK (and I'm not a football - 'soccer' to the North Americans - fan), this happened toward the end of the last century. Sky decided it would make people pay money to see football they'd been able to watch for free for years.
And did the masses of fans do anything about it? Nope they either payed up or sat back and watched highlights. Sky didn't offer the football fan anything special, just quietly made a stack of money...
It's a trap!!!!!
90% of everything is crap. Also, crap is relative.
It's a bulletin board, not a community.
Slashdot, etc., are essentially the same as even a BBS running 20 years ago under DOS and DesqView.
So get over it. Calling a bulltetin board a "community" trivializes real communities.
And if someone wants to charge people for using a website, let them. No one has an inherent right to post comments on any website.
-- Slashdot: When Public Access TV Says "No"
Admittedly, it is not very fair to first reap the fruits of the community contributions and then make tham pay, but do the community members have any rights at _all_?
If /. stopped existing tomorrow, we'd go somewhere else. If this forum mentioned asks a ridiculous amount of $$$, why don't they go somewhere else? Sounds harsh, but the forum owners owe them nothing. As an aside: probably they will shoot themselves in the foot by charging, but that's their choice.
If you look it as a form of entertainment, and then tote up the hours spent at it the net annual value of posting comments is probably far greater than $20. But the nature of the medium is immediacy. I want to respond to that idiot now. So, I think people tend to judge something like this by its immediate value. They don't think about (don't want to think about!) the annual amount of time they spend posting on a site like Slashdot.
This is another case where the missing link is a universally accepted form of micropayments. Apple's music store shows how successful the model might be, provided the cost of the transaction was reasonable vs. the average transaction. I bet that if they had an annual fee of $20 for unlimited downloads, although this would be a fabulous deal, they'd actually get fewer individuals participating. Likewise, I don't want to think about how much of my money Starbucks gets in a year, but if Starbucks had a subscription model where I gave them $100 a year for unlimited coffee, I'd hesitate and have to remind myself that I actually spend more than this annually.
In any case, if there were a universally accepted micropayment system that didn't require giving your credit card to the site, had reasonable security such as limitations on the amount that could be charged to your account in a period of time, then a micropayment system for supporting a community site would be a great success. I also like it because it gives a whole new meaning to the phrase, "putting your two cents in."
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
own alternative to a pay forum. At least as long as you mind the pie and don't let consolidation by a few big ISP's buggar things up for good.
So, after all the posturing, bent egos, and vented steam, I will not be surprised if the forum gains a renegade cousin...
A corporation trying to make a profit?! That's horrible! There should be laws against that sort of behavior!
If someone says he and his monkey have nothing to hide, they almost certainly do.
Obviously, charging a small fee would get rid of all comment spam at a stroke, provided the fee was per view of the comment not a one-off posting charge. Perhaps you'd pay one cent and the comment would disappear after ten people had read it - then you have to keep on paying for people to keep reading it. It would be nice to think the same approach would deal with trolls and idiots on forums like Slashdot, but sadly there is no correlation between the value of what you have to say and the monetary value you'd place on getting others to read it. Otherwise, paid advertising would be the most highly prized form of literature.
Of course what the world needs is some bizarre web-of-trust karma money-go-round where points of karma can be bought or sold. (You probably wouldn't have a single global karma score in a web of trust, only a weighted score that's seen differently by every individual.) As CmdrTaco said, that would be hilarious.
-- Ed Avis ed@membled.com
Haymarket didn't do anything to develop the community. AJB Publishing (the original owners) were bought out a few months ago and there's been nothing but bother since. Just to clarify.
http://www.haveoneofthese.com/
You're being a bit vague; are you referring to Planescape: Torment? The Planescape setting in general? Some other Planescape game?
he deserves it.
That's all I had to say, really. Do you take debit?
Marques Johansson
Whoa, you lost me there....
*** Looking up your hostname
*** Checking Ident
*** No Ident response
*** Couldn't look up your hostname
*** Running your credit card
*** Transaction approved
*** Welcome to the Internet Relay Network
Assume I was drunk when I posted this.
pickled pork livers
Exam 4/C again. Maybe I'll do better this time.
Why should I pay to put my 2 cents in?
Slow down, cowboy! It has been 4 hours since you last posted. You must wait another few hours.
Will bring new meaning to the phrase my $.02.
Of course that will require posting 2.74 messages per day for the year.
The value of Slashdot and other tech discussion forums is in the contributions from the members. It may take awhile to sift through the threads, but in a topic that really interests you you may find a reply that offers some new insight, a link to another project or idea, etc that really gives you something you can use. Frequently even going to the users linked homepages provides some value, as a lot of them wouldn't show up very high in a google search for instance, but still might have some great content.
Hmm, here's a for instance. I started a bookmark folder called "wireless". It is entirely filled with links I culled directly from Slashdot replies on that subject. Sort of like a mini personalised de.licio.us thing.
That's the wonderful thing about having free software, if a forum desides to start charging it's members, start your own service and say, "hey guys, I'm moving over here, who's with me?"
I had a group on meetup.com and last month they anounced monthly charges for the group organizer. I promptly droped my membership and said goodbuy to the group (it was not working out anyway).
But seriously a monthly fee for recieving what many other (most other) sites provide for free, is a great way to shutdown an active site. I think that making plees to the users to make a donation or offer new services at a premium price, is way better than charging for what was once free. Just bad business.
metafilter charges $5 to join and people and links get booted occasionally. Again, it works. Contrast this to the decline of Kuro5hin.
Ya know, the news isn't that some poor website had to resort to charging it's users. It's that /. continues to sink further into the pits by approving a story with a disgusting slant.
"Annual Fee For Your Comment?"
What in Hell is that?
thing is, apart from a few mods no-one even knew atomic was having such financial troubles.
this is why so many the once loyal members are pissed off!!!
no-one was asked to help out the forums cause they might be having a financial drain...
if a VOLUNTARY drive failed then by all means go ahead.... but this wasn't even tried and financial alternatives weren't even put to the community.
it was literally over a 2 hour period then when version 2.5 came BAM!!! come 25th you gotta pay!!!
that's poor form!!! no communication if people had been forewarned about the troubles then this backlash wouldn't have happened...
be kind to your community, but atomic wasn't!
it's karma.
I'd say it's more ambivalent whining than a vicious backlash.
not everything is a science experiment!
The SA forums have required payment for years now, and Metafilter now requires a fee for new signups (this is better then their old policy of not allowing new signups at all!) I'm not an SA forum goon, but I hear it's great over there, and Mefi rocks. Charging people keeps the rifraf of multi-accounted trolls away. IMO, why the hell not?
autopr0n is like, down and stuff.
Meetup.com<cough>
Why don't they pay us for our comments?
Like a $20 cover charge at a bar...it keeps the riff-raff out.
No, it doesn't. You assume that the "riff raff" is either poor or too tight to spend a little money for the privelege of harrassing their target forum. You also assume the same for bars and nightclubs.
In both cases that assumption is incorrect.
There are plenty of well-to-do jerks and "riff-raff", and plenty of excellent people of modest or little means, so while you may be creating a little club based on the exclusivity of daddy's wealth, you are not inherently enhancing dialogue, intellect, or ethics by using a financial filter. In fact, arguably, you're doing the opposite.
One thing is certain, you're losing a lot more interesting, worthwhile people than you are jerks when you start levying a cover charge for a discussion forum. This sort of thing reinforces the need to resurrect USENET (with decent SPAM filtering).
The Future of Human Evolution: Autonomy
There is an online gaming forum that I use; it has all kinds of interesting content provided by the members and the owner of the site (who is also a gammer himself). It uses no advertising to fund the site. Recently there has been discussion about how to continue funding the site because of shortfalls.
In the past someone always came through and donated the needed funds. In the current economic climate, that is not happening - so the owner is considering various options for funding from the user community.
The site costs about $3000 per year for the network connectivity and to maintain in a datacenter environment - someone has to pay for it. The owner doesn't have the cash to eat the costs not covered by the anonymous doners.
The owner asked for input from the users to determine how best to handle it, and several options were put forward:
1. Set up a paypal account for the site, and ask for donations from the users - have a 'counter' that shows how much of the total yearly bill is left to pay.
2. Charge membership dues - with 300 users - each person would pay $10.
3. Bring in advertising (with only 300 users - that is probably not a viable solution).
The point is someone has to pay - particularly if the site in question grows beyond the capacity of a single person to maintain out-of-pocket.
Lodragan Draoidh
The more you explain it, the more I don't understand it. - Mark Twain
When they charge people (even with advertising), they reduce their hits. When they do something as obviously classist as charging some people for posting, they frustrate casual readers, greatly reduce readership and the motivation of others to post -- less rep, influence & help.
Then they started charging membership fees. Membership #'s dropped, and with the lack of members, the amount and quality of information and oppinions dropped as well. It became basically useless compared to what it once was. I don't know what it looks like nowdays, but I won't be going back there any time soon to find out.
IGN.com, and im surre they were not the only ones. They did the same thing. Gained a huge user base, lots of people dedicated to their site from the start, then, once they grew large enough, wham!, we are no longer free. Please pay. And for that action, i eternally hate that website and any relation to that site. I think all users of the AtomicMPC site should do the same and not pay up.
I'm guessing they're just afraid it'll turn into Slashdot.
SA charges $10 for a forum membership, and it's worth every penny, and then some.
mstyne: real name, no gimmicks
Are you kidding? I am so spoiled by /. that I get frustrated when I can't tack a comment on NYT articles. And I'd love to let a few .gov pages know what I think of their content while were at it. Call me crazy but I trust the mob to trample "news" that isn't newsworthy.
Come to think of it, only moderated, commented news is worth a fee and those hacks at CNN, NYT, EETimes, news.com and so on should give away their articles and only charge for them after we have graffiti'd the bejeebers out of them...yeah, thats the ticket! and micropayments back to the commenters with higher ranked comments...that'll teach those AC's a thing or two!
SLASHDOT: news for people who can't concentrate on work or have no life at all and got tired of yelling back at the TV.
Is this a trend I should worry about?
Hmm. Is it?
The reaction to this announcement triggered the most vicious backlash I have ever witnessed as the website feedback forum went beserk.
I think you just answered your own question there.
Content = value. If you're providing me content, I may consider paying you for it, if I feel the value is great enough. But if I'M the one providing content to YOU, as is the case with users posting on websites' forums, don't expect me to do you TWO favors and give you my money as well.
In the realm of printed material, a publisher that will offer to publish any paper you write if you pay them enough is called a SCAM (or an "academic journal"). I'll pay to READ content, but not to CREATE content.
It's interesting that this topic of paying for comments should come up. My cubemates and I were talking yesterday about the progression of Slashdot over the years, and how the quality of posts has seemed to have been drained.
There are quite a few ways of tweaking the conversation system (moderation, friend-or-foe, payment, karma bonuses) but you'd have Slashdotters screaming bloody murder if the default was changed. Personally I would like to see comments pushed out over an Atom feed (or the like) and 3rd party filters applied to them in whatever fancy way they see fit. I don't know, maybe they're already out there.
Here's a filter that I would like to see: people could subscribe to groups (which could be free or for pay, it's up to the group maintainer), and those posts written by members of that group would be flagged or given point boosts. This way I could see comments from people who identify with a certain group whose opinion I respect.
So the article starts by claiming that you have to pay to post.
But goes on to say the fee is for access.
And also says that "high status" users will continue to get free access. Night not these be those who are adjudged to post the most useful info?
So exactly how does this correspond to "pay to post"?
Not arguing whether having to pay to access is good or bad (you can always vote with your feet). Just grumbling that the headline and the body of the item seem to be separated at the neck.
is that how you really spell balk ("baulk") down under?
I agree that asking you to cough up an annual fee that entitles you to publish your own comments is a bit hard to swallow (so to speak)...but they are trying to deal with a problem that many web information and services providers face--how do you make money doing this? Or (if you are nonprofit) how do you collect enough money to cover expenses?
Ads are usually a dumb idea--they're annoying, and the web is not your dad's TV. I control what happens on my computer, so I shut out all those annoying, animated ads. The only time I like ads--and when they are effective--is when I'm looking to buy something, and the ads give me information relevant to my research on that product. (That's why I like Google ads.)
Annual memberships are another way, but I've seldom forked over the $10 or $20 (or whatever) that some membership websites ask for "premium content," nor do I respond to appeals for charity, along the lines of "please donate some $$ to keep this website afloat".
I know, I know, I'm a bad person. But there are a lot of lazy cheapskates like me out there parasitically sucking the lifeblood out of really useful websites that some poor hardworking geek is providing for free out of the kindness of his heart (until he burns out, the website goes away, and he goes into another career, like being a pharmacist).
But hold on. I'd like to offer a solution to the problem posed by social parasites such as myself. The solution to getting paid for providing web content is...charge for it. But don't charge a lump sum--charge very little. Charge so little that people don't notice. Suppose that you run a site that contains all sorts of valuable resources for people who like to play some game...like Everquest (a favorite of mine--I'm a D.E., of course). How would you like to collect a penny for every time someon hits your site to look up the details on where to find a rare artifact? No begging, no membership solicitations, no tearful pleas for charity. Just another penny on the stack every time someone opens a web page of yours. It might not make you rich...but if your content is worthwhile, you'd be able to meet expenses. And if your site is really popular, who knows--you might live quite well.
It's an odd fact of human psychology that I (who am, of course, a normal Dark Elf...er human) wouldn't mind paying little tiny dribbles of money for stuff I really enjoy, where I would rebel at having to authorize a lump sum payment.
So how do you implement a scheme like this? Sure, the devil is in the details. We'd need some infrastructure--a way of authenticating who the visitor is, a way of billing the visitor, and a way of transferring the accumulated funds to the web host. That would take some doing--but it's not rocket science. Even Paypal might manage it. Public/private key schemes could be used for authentication of anonymous accounts. Web services providers would get paid, and I'd see another line item on my credit card every month, and breathe a sigh of relief that I am not a complete parasite after all.
Great men are almost always bad men--Lord Acton's Corollary
eBay is a content driven system where the content submitters pay to post their items. Perhaps there is some room for charging for a marketplace for ideas as well.
Heh, that hasn't happened here...
What would I do without all the insightful, anonymous 3 steps to PROFIT comments?
unless you are a magazine subscriber or a high-ranking forum member.
by high ranking, is that by post count, or user ratings? does only a % of users get this deal per month or does it mean once you're a high ranking forum member, you're a high ranking forum member for life?
HD Trailers
You are of course right about ties for Christmas and, technically, about ownership. I'm obviously just horrible at explaining what I mean.
What I meant is more about wrapping it up in a pretense of being a "community". That, no siree, bob, I'm not exploiting you, we're just one one big happy community, and we're all just giving to the common good. Except that in practice, let's say I then take what you thought you gave to the _community_ and use it for _myself_. E.g., sell it.
I think a "community" is a two way street. I might for example help you move, but I'll expect that you too would sometime be willing to return the favour if I ever really need it. The moment it becomes a relationship in which one only takes and another only gives, it's no longer a "community".
I'm no longer a GPL zealot, I'm not saying it's some supreme embodiment of "freedom of speech", and I'm not saying everyone must use it or anything... but I will use it as an example of what "community" means. Because IMHO that's what's it about: you can have my code for free, but I'll expect that you too give any any changes back as free code. That's what a "community" is all about. (Once you wrap it up in enough legalese to be a bullet-proof contract.)
Pretending it's some "community" when it's just an organized way to uni-laterally reap the benefits of someone else's work, is... lame. It's a scam. A con.
It is, of course, theirs once I donated it. I'm not suing over ownership or anything. I've been scammed fair and square. But it will still leave me with a bitter taste.
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
How many would keep using slashdot if they had to pay to use it any level?
For those willing to pay, would they be willing to keep paying if they were not happy with the management?
The guy with the free TiVo says he caught a good deal, a life time subscription for $200,
Uhm, maybe I'm missing something, but if he paid $200 for a lifetime subscription, how exactly is that free for him?
http://slashdot.org/~tf23/journal
I realize bandwidth costs can be high for some forums.
I realize that having a ton of banner ads could clutter any webpage or site.
So, why not make a seperate forum at CooLSiteX where people or businesses pay to post?
It is easy enough and non-intrusive enough to create an "area" on a forum which is a marketplace containing classified ads of interest to the typical posters of a site. It is easy enough for site members who want to sell something to pony up some dough to post wares they want to sell.
Your ideas that this is analogous to taking paper from an office supply shop is misplaced. Given the scale of the office supply store, you just might find that you get a ream of paper just for walking through the door. A smaller store would be less likely to give away freebies while a large chain would give away freebies.
So, why not try to insulate smaller stores to have capacities of larger stores?
That's where this Interents thing is supposed to be some form of equalizer. A leveler playing field.
I just don't buy anything you cited above, dude. A smartly run site should find ways of staying afloat especially if the site's owner is not creating content themselves. Newspapers cover costs with ads and try to profit from sales of the product to readers. Two revenue sources are typical regardelss of of teh size of the paper. And, then there are the alt weekly freebies. All paid for by ads.
AlL oF YOur Sla/ do. r B3l0ng to US$$.
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Maybe we can coin the term "Phorum Phishing"
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Or did you mean: chuff?
Obscure
chuffed
[Brit] proud, satisfied
Maybe this idea is too radical for everyone. Perhaps it's too fair to be realistic in the kind of society we have today. Perhaps it would cost too many people their egos.
What about a pay to moderate system?
fast as fast can be. you'll never catch me.
If /. had a pay to moderate system, coupled with the ability to filter posts in both ascending and descending order, one could get two viewpoints on every discussion.
I doubt that economics would line up with intellect, however.
fast as fast can be. you'll never catch me.
There are a lot of good points about paid subscriptions:
Look at the forums on somethingawful.com
-Millions of Monkeys, Millions of typewriters, 6 hours of sorting through faeces encrusted pages to find: This post
I think it's a great idea. If people had to pay to write the sort of shite that appears here every hour, perhaps there would be a hell of a let less of it.
I cannot believe there is not a single comment about this issue. The article had a nice quote:
The requisite question then is: Who should be paying?Under copyright law and considering many of the things the *AAs and publishers have been saying about the value of copyrighted speech, are the posts of the visitors to the site not the factor that makes the site valuable? Do their posts not exceed the value of the site's articles and the magazine? Should the magazine not be contributing its revenues to users with highly modded or highly visited posts?
In short, who should be getting paid here?
All data is speech. All speech is Free.
I think you'll find that your current provider would be happy to give you a new phone. Some even proactively contact you an offer you a new phone (like Verizon's "New Every Two").
"Avoid employing unlucky people - throw half of the pile of CVs in the bin without reading them." -- David Brent
There's always choice and there are legitimate viewpoints from every angle. You can argue that the hosts have the right to impose whatever system they want. The users have the right to say "stuff you, goodbye". That's the way it is, nobody's an evil Christian Communist Terrorist.
I would argue that some thoughfulness and understanding should be applied. If your readers of x years suddenly get asked to pay money, they will be pissed. Especially if the service you provided was never that unique anyway. Far better to take a collection first and see how that works out, most people will react much better and depending on your audience some people may simply not be able to pay.
How do you kill that which has no life?
I imagine this is not without precedent. Who pays to maintain the /. servers? What if one day they suddenly were faced with an inability to make such payments? How many here would be willing to donate money to take up the slack? With a user base as large as /. each person donating a dollar would go a long way to maintaining it. On the other hand if someone got the hairbrained idea to just start charging to turn a buck because of declining subscription sales, in which case they could subsidize their loss, then one would have to ask oneself if that is the type of periodical that you would like to read.
I am Bennett Haselton! I am Bennett Haselton!
Let's not forget the $5 donation to be able to ask questions on MeFi. But I've gotten some of the most intelligent, well thought-out answers I've ever seen while reading, contributing to, and asking questions on Ask MeFi.
It can work.